29th November 2010 Archive

On May 6, 1998, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iMac at the Flint Center Theater in Apple's home town of Cupertino, California — the same venue where he had unveiled the original Macintosh back in 1984.

A Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing that China's Politburo "directed" last December's hack on Google's internal systems, according to the confidential US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks and various news organizations on Sunday.

Rubber skins and plastic hard cases may not provide your iPad with the all-encompasing protection of a folio or slipcase, but they'll certainly take the knocks - and bring some colour and individuality to your tablet.

According to manufacturers, folios are the most popular iPad cases in Europe. With their book-like looks, the ability of many of them to double-up a stands and the extra drop protection they offer - all that extra padding at the corners - it's not hard to see why.

What do you buy the iPad owner who has everything? Another case of course, and to help you choose one - for yourself too, if you're a fan of the Apple tablet - Reg Hardware has gathered together, reviewed and rated dozens of the things.

One in eight IT projects succeeds. What do we learn from the other seven?

Remember this comment about a particular project somewhere in the Middle East? “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we do not know we don’t know.”

A denial of service attack against Wikileaks that brought the whistleblower site to its knees on Sunday night, in the run up to its publication of classified State Department documents, may turn out to be the work of a lone hacker.

Do you suffer from unsatisfactory projectile climaxes? Is your software construction methodology previous generation? Do you require the predictable outcome of pre-planning with the flexibility of iteration and the lightness of touch of partially de-hierarchicalised management approaches?

The inventor of a medical device is entitled to a 'fair share' of the actual benefit earned from that device by his employer, the Court of Appeal has ruled. An inventor cannot complain if his employer did not exploit the invention well or at all, it said.

Bring up the topic of overclocking to the major system manufacturers and you hear a variety of responses ranging from ‘we’re plenty fast enough now – take a look at our _____ (insert benchmark here) that’s enabled by our use of ___________(insert techno feature here)” to “it’s just not safe, son, and our customers need to be protected from this kind of thing.”

According to a story that's popular in Washington, after Bill Clinton held his first meeting with his intelligence chiefs as President, he pulled them aside. "Look, guys," he said. "There's really two things I want to know: Who killed the Kennedys? And have aliens landed?"

This is Part Two of a special report about the formation and early years of Symbian. It contains stories and plans that have never previously come to light. Part One dealt with the formation of the venture. Here’s the main course: how the decisions taken between 1999 and 2001 shaped not just the future of Symbian, but the course of the mobile industry over the next decade.

BlackBerry maker RIM is advertising for an interoperability testing specialist, with a view to ensuring that BlackBerry devices work properly with NFC. RIM has revealed that such devices are in development.

Diametrically opposed views on how to deal with sex workers were on display this weekend, with Canada teetering on the brink of legalising prostitution, and the UK’s Met warning media owners that they could face criminal charges if they carry ads for massage parlours and saunas.

International boffins are vying with one another in a race to topsy-turvinate the world of physics this week, with a flurry of results due in imminently from radical fabric-of-time-and-space-rending experiments at the Large Hadron Collider - most brutally powerful particle-pummeller ever assembled by the human race.

Mellanox Technologies will cough up $218m in cash to acquire networking rival Voltaire as it seeks to gain a larger footprint in data centre networks and a better chance to wring more profits out of the combined companies.